


Cuckoo

by belleweather



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Gen, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-04-03
Updated: 2010-04-03
Packaged: 2021-03-10 00:34:45
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,892
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27985458
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/belleweather/pseuds/belleweather
Summary: Petunia adjusts to having a cuckoo in her nest.
Kudos: 2





	Cuckoo

**Author's Note:**

> (Written in 2010, originally posted on the LJ Community "The Pimp Cane")

He was a quiet baby, and Petunia supposed that was his only saving grace. She tried her hardest to ignore him, and mostly he made it easy for her. Little Harry didn’t fuss or cry or spit up the way her little angel Dudley did. He seemed content to spend time in the playpen, sucking his fingers, and playing with his toes and gumming ragged stuffed Dudley had outgrown or lost interest in. Vernon insisted that the fact that the boy was so quiet was just another example of how much smarter their Dudley was. Privately, Petunia found such quiet in a small child to be positively spooky and very un-Dursely like. It was positively unsettling the way those dark green eyes seemed to look straight through her.

Babies that weren’t touched, weren’t held or cared for were supposed to waste away and die, she’d read it in a study in the paper somewhere, she knew. She wondered what it was that was keeping that child here, if it was a memory, if Lily or worse yet James came to him in his sleep and rocked him and sang to him, and held him tight, bestowing their love from another plane where Petunia withheld hers. Because he didn’t wither and he didn’t die

Still, during the long days of the winter, Petunia found herself trying as much as she could to ignore the boy. She would wake up in the morning, feed Dudley first, making airplane noises and blowing raspberries at him, then cleaning him off and setting him to play in the on the rug, even watching a little of the morning stories before she bothered with feeding any left over cereal to the boy.

Even as she spooned cereal into Harry’s willing mouth, she felt his eyes bore into her. They seemed go right through her like a curse, that preternatural color lightening and darkening as they looked around. They seemed years and years older than the child himself, as if there was something looking back out at the world and recording all the wrongs done to him for later settling of the score, and until them, he was just biding his time. ‘J’Accuse!’ They seemed to shout, like the revolutionaries in France that Petunia had learned about in primary school.

She cursed Lily and her stupid husband for leaving her with this stupid problem as she loaded the boys into a double pram to go out for a walk, Dudley loudly practicing his newest word, “Won’t”. As she wrestled Duddy-kins into the pram, she would think terribly, angry thoughts about leaving Harry where he was, alone the house. Surely, if he was in the playpen he couldn’t come to any harm? After all, it wasn’t as if they had any dirty pets or anything. There was nothing that could hurt him.

It took a week after the thought occurred to her for Petunia to get up the nerve to do it. She knew it was wrong, leaving a one-year old child alone in the house with no adult anywhere near. She felt guilt swirl in her stomach as she loaded Dudley into the pram, pushed it out the front door and down the broad walk on to privet drive. Her hands shook on the push bar, and she glanced about, wondering if any of the neighbors would notice, would be able to see what she’d done.

She took Dudley around to the shops, doing a bit of browsing for Christmas gifts for Vernon and then stopped into the ice cream parlor for a sundae for Dudley, which he screamed for, and played with, and rubbed into his eyes and hair and clothes, and a bit of a soda for herself. She smiled at his display of boyish high spirits, but her head was haunted by the memory of those bright green eyes, older than their years, and staring right through her, as if they were some how looking at her from a mile away. She hurriedly wiped the sticky mess off her son, and pushed him home.

She stopped at the market to pick up a few things, lamb for Vernon’s dinner, and a bit of cereal for the baby. She found the rhythm of her steps slowing as they got closer and closer to Privet drive, found that snake of guilt that seemed to be burrowing deep inside her come to life again as she fumbled her key into the lock and opened the door. She stepped inside and the house was silent around her. She cocked her ear, searching for the quiet baby babble, the noise of tears, but there was nothing, no sound from the cuckoo child. She unloaded Dudley from the pram, and set him on her hip, wiping the last of the melted ice cream away from his face in a futile effort to avoid going in to the sitting room, to avoid seeing that child.

With slow steps, she crossed the threshold and the playpen came into view. He was laying there, curled on his stomach, nappy-clad bottom sticking into the air, his mouth full with three of his fingers, green eyes closed. Her sigh of relief seems to steal out of her to fill the whole room.

After that it became easier to leave him. She would leave him downstairs in his playpen while she bathed Dudley and rocked him to sleep, singing lullabies and loosing herself for a moment in the heaviness of her child in her arms, in the soft scent of his skin. When she came downstairs, Vernon would be watching telly, and the boy would be asleep, hidden back in the corner where they put his playpen. Curled into himself as if seeking out warmth from his own body that would never feel again, the warmth that he used to seek from his mother and would never receive from her. It seemed after that the she could ignore him for longer and longer, loose herself in the television and forget that there was a baby behind her, lost in dreams of parents long dead.

She wondered, late at night, if he held to the memories of what his life had been like with his parents, with her odious sister and that good-for-nothing man of hers. She’d only met James once, when Lily had first brought him home. Her perfect sister had been upstairs, finishing her hair when there had been a knock at the door. Her mother had called out for the kitchen for Petunia to answer it. She’d been shocked as she pulled open the door at the man who stood there, his every movement limned in nervousness. He wasn’t tall, he was little taller that her, really. His dark hair shimmered with drops of water from the eternal borderland rain, and tiny, misty droplets had clung to his glasses like little stars adding sparkle to deep hazel eyes.

She could remember how it had felt, even see it as if she’d outside of herself, floating behind James with a perfect view the sharp intake of breath slipping through the O of her open lips. And then he’d smiled. And her heart had started to beat a little faster.

“Hello.” He’d said, the voice deep and just a little shaky. “I’m James Potter.”

“C-C-Come in…” she had stuttered, moving out of the way of the door, gesturing for him to come in. the entry way had been small, narrow, and she could feel the heat of his skin, the water beading off his coat as he slid past her, as she directed him into the sitting room. He’d turned toward her, bent that dark head, speckled with stars her way, intending what, she still didn’t know, when Lily had walked down the stairs.

She could see this so clearly, as if it were a film of her own humiliation. She didn’t know what she’d been thinking, didn’t know what madness possessed her to think even for a second that this lovely caller had been at all interested in her. But he’d smiled…

James head shot up, and Petunia knew in an instant that the smile she’d seen had been but a ghost of what he was capable of. The moment he set eyes on Lily, his face opened up like the face of God coming down from the clouds to look upon the earth. The Hazel eyes turned gold and sparkling, and the smile took over his whole face, until it was as if even his fingers, even the hair on his head was smiling at her. She could see it in her mind still, the way her sister’s face had brightened with a blush as she descended the few remaining stairs, pushing past Petunia as if she were nothing more than a piece of the furniture to step into James’s arms.

Looking at them together, at the perfect pair they’d made, hearing the jokes as he handed her a bouquet of flowers that she knew hadn’t been in his hand a moment before, hearing her tease, asking him “Who taught you that transfiguration trick, Sirius?”, seeing their easy banter, his quiet smile, the way his gaze remained on Lily even as she went to the coat closet, slipped her jacket on, as they left the house, which suddenly felt small and dingy and quiet without him.

Petunia thought of her own boyfriend, even now getting chubby around the middle, forgetting to return her phone calls. There would be no flowers from him. He said she was lucky to have him as her fellow at all. He was always trying to reach under her shirt, to get her to ‘go all the way’, an idea that she found horribly distasteful.

She’d refused to attend their wedding when it had been announced, telling her parents that she couldn’t possibly leave her job as a secretary for Grunnings Drills even for the two days that would be required to travel to Scotland. It had been later that week that Vernon Dursley, who worked in procurement at a desk a floor down from Petunia’s had asked her out, who she’d occasionally run into getting a bun at the bakery across the street. It was easy to be with him. Vernon made all the decisions, made it clear what she ought to think and do. Everything with him was decided, every day just like the last. He swept her along in his wake, and They’d married later that year. She hadn’t bothered to send an invitation to Godric’s Hollow, where her sister was living. And that night, when Vernon, dressed properly in striped pyjamas came to her bed for the first time, she tried to block out the memory of eyes the color of heather honey, and black hair tangled with stars.

And now the only remaining piece of James on this earth, his infant son, was trusted to her unwilling hands. Harry lay curled up in his playpen, those unnatural green eyes covered, his small body sighing in sleep as Petunia crossed the floor in her nightgown to peer down at him. The cold of the January night broke goose-bumps out on her skin as she watched his chest rise and fall. She reached out, hesitantly to touch him, as the german clock on the mantle rang out ‘cuckoo…cuckoo…”


End file.
